Late 2010, at a disco in the 15th arrondissement of Paris: Marine Le Pen is not yet president of the National Front, let alone a candidate for the highest office in France. In a crowded room, she addresses the rank and file. She whips up the room, denouncing "the Europe of Brussels" and espousing protectionism, border control and a withdrawal from the euro. The 700 people present raise the roof.

Fast forward a year and the presidential candidate is at it again. Le Pen has not diluted her message. The Europe that grew from the foundations of the 1957 Treaty of Rome must go. Euroscepticism, even Europhobia, is one of the fundamentals of the far right. Its voters reject the European project, synonymous for them with social breakdown and dislocation.

The far right is not alone in this. Several parties and figures on the left also oppose, for very different reasons, the process of European integration. But it was the National Front that claimed much of the kudos, for example, when France rejected the European constitutional treaty in a 2005 referendum.

For the National Front, the European Union is the other face of the globalisation coin, responsible for unemployment, immigration and insecurity.

It is a paradox that Le Pen's original political platform was as … a Euro MP. She was elected under the slogan "Europe hurts". She even gave up her role as local councillor for the Hénin-Beaumont region in order to be able to serve in the European parliament.

Le Pen's pitch is this: that in order to go back to the idea of a strong, interventionist state, France must leave the EU.

"We will have to strike down the European treaties, the treaties of the mainstream parties, which are holding us back and condemning us to isolation. This anything-goes politics has become totally anachronistic throughout the world," she said earlier this month.

Le Pen is not scared of outspoken, even contradictory utterances on this issue. She is perfectly capable of dubbing the EU "the Trojan horse of ultraliberal globalisation" at the same time as comparing it to the USSR and referring to "a European Soviet Union".

And when one of her interlocutors raised the legal difficulties involved with pulling out of the EU, Le Pen had a reply of a similar tone. For her, the EU "is a bit like communism, it's totalitarian. We've been told for years that we can't leave."

In frontist parlance, the EU has been built "against" and "without" the European people. The far right sees the idea of a European culture as being not legal nor political in essence, but civilisational, based on a Judeo-Christian heritage.

Le Pen also knows that politics is about symbols. Thus one of her proposals is to ban the raising of the European flag on public buildings: "When I say that public buildings should always, in all parts of the country, carry the tricolor and that the European flag should be banned, I am showing our unswerving attachment to our national flag. And that this shocks people merely reinforces my conviction."